qwicksilver Caught this movie on TV, and I honestly didn't even finish it. I don't need to know the ending to the film to give an accurate review mostly because the plot doesn't matter and it's clear that watching more would only sour my opinion more on it.So here's basically the breakdown: The acting's terribly ham-fisted at times.The fight scenes could have been worse but show pretensions clearly beyond the budget.The storyline, while vaguely interesting, is executed in such a way that hurts the teeth just to look at it.Almost everything in the film has obvious pretensions towards being a much better film than it was ever capable of being.What is good about this film is that there certainly was some potential to be a decent television Sci-Fi movie if handled properly. The high concept is just interesting enough to drive the plot along, but it was honestly fleshed out in the worse way possible, making it a simplistic tale about angels and demons, love and hate. Rather than either making the plot less mystical, or adjusting the tone of the movie to be more of a drama, the film tries so hard to approach films that far surpass it (Scenes directly echoed crouching tiger, the Matrix, and I'm sure many other films).Rather than taking the action into the realm of minimalism, the film decides to use special effects that only serve to further exclaim how little money this film was made for. They use the kind of effects that stand out so blatantly as "effects". They are obviously fake, some might be interesting to look at, but it's clear that they have no basis in reality. Good effects make unrealistic situations seem plausible, whereas these are like watching a low quality comic come to life. Even the film effects scream out to be noticed so loud that they prove to be neither interesting, nor original.I can say, however, that the art and set direction are actually not bad. This seems to be the only part of the film that understands its low budget nature, and the set department/DOP seems to adopt the philosophy of any good low budget film, which is to use as many ready-made locations as possible, and to keep the overall look less cluttered and more clean. I only wish that the rest of the film were thinking in such a way.

translator I haven't seen but 10 min of the movie, but i've seen enough. It had potential, you say? Well, let me break it down for you.Os, formerly one of the "Shadowmen" (who were "exiled to the Earth for committing crimes against cosmic evolution") is accosted by the "White Warrior" and converted by the "Light". Now a soldier of good, he must fight the bad guys ("Shadowmen"), with the aid of the "Elements", who have come into the possession of some "Tablet" and threaten to destroy the Earth.If you're older than 6 and that sounds like potential... Well, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you're in a serious need of a life.The plot's simply inane. I'm all for a little bit of the good ole Good vs. Evil type of action, but not when it seems to have been written by a slightly retarded kid who's never been out of the house and is fed a steady diet of New Age, Matrix and X-Box. And whose only layer is Absolutely Superficial. I mean, layered "adult fairy tales" are one thing - obvious, jejune, insultingly simple stories for the slow on the uptake are another. Add to that idiotic electronic "score" (compliments of Casio defaults), cheap "effects", laughable studio scenery and lighting, wanna-be Matrix/kung-fu fights, amateurish camera-work, and a lot of "profound", solemnly-delivered lines containing a lot of capitalized nouns ("the War is within", "Freedom is inside all life"...) and you get a mess that's so bad it ain't even funny. No, seriously. This is a whole new level.

bochipper I expected to see a film closely related to Mortal Combat, and it appeared to have some of those elements, i.e., Fantasy martial arts, Good vs. Evil "end-times" saga. How can one not enjoy a good 'character-transformation' film? One could criticize the script for leaps in logic, but it is a fantasy film, so rationalism can kind of be thrown out. If Zen concepts are foreign to you, Os's circular parables will probably be nothing more than gibberish. Unless you're watching a documentary, most films are entertainment, not meant for some deep, life altering knowledge. This film was entertaining, and, it had some things to contemplate. Zane's interpretation of the evil-turned-good-raptured-superhuman character is both fun and "deep". If you've had too much of the wire-work Hong Kong films of late, you might enjoy this film for a change.

Conagher-7 This movie wasn't as good as it could have been. The potential was there, with a decent plot and a few good actors, but it was just not done well.The idea of a group of different individuals putting their differences aside and coming together to achieve a common goal is not new, but it can be done well. Here it was not. I didn't watch the movie for the story, which was good as it was not real good. The whole "love will overcome all" is a good idea, but Os runs it into the ground to the point that he comes across as one of those fake happy lovely-dovey Mormon missionary types that makes most people nauseous.Judging from the commercials and the packaging, I expected this to be more of a martial arts movie. Sadly, where most martial arts movies use the story to connect the fight scenes, this movie apparently forgot that it was a martial arts flick and concentrated on a really weak story at the expense of the fighting. One could count the number of fight scenes in this movie on the fingers of one hand and still have plenty of fingers left. The fights that it did have weren't all that great, either. The fighting relied a lot on wires, which is okay for a fairy-tale or a wuxia movie, but it just looked silly here. Also, it wasn't hard to tell that the actors trained just long enough to pull this movie's few fight scenes off. The actions weren't crisp or particularly fast, and they tried to hide all of this via flickering lighting, jerky camera shots and slow-motion. It was just not good from a martial arts perspective.Unfortunately, most of this 90 minute snoozer is only worth fast-forwarding through, which I did for most of the last thirty minutes, and I'm kicking myself for not fast-forwarding earlier through the totally inane temptation scene. Fast-forwarding through a movie is something I almost never do, but I couldn't take it after an hour of drivel. This movie may have worked as a children's cartoon or some sort of kids live-action movie, but not as a movie aimed at a post-adolescent audience. Mel Gibson I can forgive for being involved in this silly movie, but Jet Li ought to know better. Hopefully he did it as a favor or lost a bet or something.Bottom line - avoid this one.